House of Commons from 1998-06-18

House of Commons from 1998-06-18

DenDragon	Greetings and thank you for attending tonight's Open House.
DenDragon	Tonight's meeting has no set topic, so all questions related to UO will be acceptable, with the following exceptions:
DenDragon	Bug reports on the rep system will largely be ignored tonight.
DenDragon	There are other times and places for those. ;)
DD	Basically, this isn't the best way to get a bug report across, there's not enough room or time for detail.
DenDragon	If you have any questions regarding the Reputation System, please visit http://uo.stratics.com/reputation
DenDragon	and see if your question is answered by that FAQ.
DenDragon	In order to submit questions please /msg or /query Aphrodite, Glamdring, Ssendam, Rainman, or Drax. Do not /msg me or any of the OSI team.
DenDragon	I will be the moderator for tonight, you may begin submitting questions.
DenDragon	*Dar_LoD* Question that worries a lot of people involved in Guild Warfare: Is there anything that could be done about blue healers problem, for example make them flagged orange to the enemies of the guildmember they healed, so they could be attacked without fear of murder count by rivals of the guy they healed. Whats the OSI stance on this problem?
DD	That's a tricky problem. Temporarily making them "a member of the guild" may not be the way to handle it though.
DD	It makes for yet another weird timeout system to have to create, and the data stored on a player for being "orange" is very different
DD	from any other sorts of like criminal flagging.
DD	SO maybe just a criminal flag would apply. But we haven't made any decisions yet and are still evaluating it
DenDragon	*M-OthLanar* Are there any plans to make specialization worth something? As in a pure mage (leather armour max) more powerful than a Tank Mage? And archers more clumsy with full plate.
DD	Sure are. :) As many of you know, we started out on a process of weapons rebalancing that revised all weapons damages
DD	that doesn't solve the problem in itself, but it does include harsher dex penalties for armor
DD	We are also investigating the possibility of having more "subsidiary skills" to go with magery, so that it takes more skill points to specialize in it
DD	that would help with the "tan kmage problem" by simply maing a mage specialist a different and more effective mage than a tank mage
DD	So basically, we have several approaches to try. We're also looking very hard at what we can do beyond the weapons rebalancing to fix archery imabalnces.
DenDragon	*C_Avatar* How long before we can build our own forges, now that the Rep patch is in?
DD	Not sure. Some of that code was still being worked on today, I know.
DenDragon	*SkyDemonX* Taming question: will it be made so that taming dragons and hellhounds and feeding them to extremely happy will ever make them not randomly attack people? Seems like taming is worthless since December and now if horses go wild in town, they are clobbered before you can retame.
DD	We don't currently have any plans to make those "safe" in that way by merely feeding. Maybe in a taming revision at some point we could make it dependent on the taming skill of the person giving orders or something, but we don't currently have plans for a taming revision
DenDragon	*Kato* I have a suggestion, When looting a corpse can you make it so an invisible person is revealed when taking a item or just peaking in a corpse?
DD	We consider staying hidden while looting to be a bug, and we will be fixing it.
DenDragon	*viking* What is the status of the current freeze lag problems on some of the servers?
DD	We are working very hard on resolving performance problems. They are related to the number of guilds on the servers (which shot up with the rep system, big surprise!). We've got a round one of optimizations ready to go in very soon-probably in the next couple business days, we hope
DD	Don't want to give a firm date though just in case we miss it. ;) But we are very aware of the problem and are working to resolve it
DenDragon	*C_Bakura* Is there any possibility to have a HIDDEN tag on you when you are hiding. It is extremely hard to tell if you are still hidden, especially if wearing gray (death) robes or if hiding behind a tree. This tag need be only visible to you.
DD	hadn't ever thought about it. Hmm. It's possible, I guess, but I'll have to investigate
DenDragon	*eXpLoSIOn* Any chance of creating things like War Horses (a horse with more hit points that could wear armor) and Charriots for several people? If you improve the existing ways of transportation, maybe this could be part of the solution of the recall spell problem.
DD	Nope. That's new art in the 3d anims, which we can't do. :(
DenDragon	*Maximus* Some of my skills do not seem to atrophy (like wrestling) , no matter what I do. Whats up?
DD	Just avoid using it. It will go down slowly. if you are not at the skill cap, you probably don't even need to worry about it.
DenDragon	*Kartman* Can you make the same type potions stackable?
DD	Only if they are of the same strength. :)
DenDragon	*Auzrewrath* any plans in making it possible to create/buy beds, rugs.... and other furniture?
DD	Numerous items like that are going to be craftable in the crafting skills revision, which is also planned to fix all the little loopholes with resources not being consumed
DenDragon	*DaVaRiouS* what is going to be done about having to stop a swing while moving into an enemy? even if archery rebalancing is done, they may move away and fire at u with no problems?
DD	That's why we've come to think that only doing weapons stats changes is not sufficient to solve the problem
DD	But we haven't got a concrete plan on how to handle it yet. It will likely involve pauses or delays when firing missile weapons that make it impossible to fire while running.
DD	There's some stuff like that in the code now, so we may just have to "turn it up"
DenDragon	*C-Pretender* Are there any plans to revise stealing? I think that it is too slow and obvious at its current state.
DD	we don't have any plans for stealing at the moment
DenDragon	*Xeno[DnA]* when will magery do damage in towns?
DD	We don't know. But candidly, we are kinda disturbed by the amount of mayhem in the towns. So Lord British is considering making towns fight-free
DD	If only on the grounds of public health--too much blood in the streets
DD	Obviously, there's a lot of cool stuff that could fall by the wayside if we made that decision, but if the cities remain abattoirs, we may have to do it
DenDragon	*Mantis* Do you plan to change the weight of scrolls? Right now, each scroll wheighs one stone (in a stack). Basically the weight of two scrolls = one log. This isn't very realistic, when are inscribers supposed to have high strength? I usally have to make three trips hauling 200 blank scrolls from the librarys to my house. I think in a stack, scrolls should wheigh 1/2 or 1/4 of a stone.
DD	I'll make a note of that and we'll see what we can do
DenDragon	*sulla* When will the healing of blue players and killing cows no longer cause karma-loss?
DD	As soon as the next update, I hope.
DenDragon	*RofGil3ad* are there any plans to finally lower the power of guards to rational/roleplayable levels?
DD	Well, here's the deal. If we do, will players promise not to abuse them? :) We understand that people want to be able to fight them to a standstill, escape from them, defeat them...
DD	but we're pretty sure everyone would be upset if evil scum fought them to a standstill, escaped from them and defeated them every time they met them
DenDragon	*BroadBand* How hard would it be to make the light level in towns and outside darker, thus making torches and candles more viable? Right now either night or day you can see clearly in the wilderness.
DD	Not too hard. But we are concerned because those with slower video cards get a performance hit from lots of lights on screen. So we're cautious about that change, though we find it desirable
DD	For that matter, I'd love to go back to having NPC schedules so that shops are closed at night, but I don't know how players would take it (particularly newbies)
DenDragon	*MarionDeLunar* Ever since monsters began to poison, Despise has been almost untraverseable. How about making monsters do different ranks of poisons? Currently only slimes do lesser and anything else does deadly.
DD	I'll make Eviljohn check into that :)
DD	I'll have EvilJohn check into that too.
DenDragon	*VirulLord* Do you think Lord British will ever make a public appearance?
DD	He just did. :P He has been in the game every day for the last week. Most recently he visited Silk's Tavern
DD	He's also been sending emails to fan websites about the Rebellion roleplay event.
DD	However, we learned that if he stays on too long, or if we anounce his presence, everyone in the game goes to the one spot. Which is bad. :P
DenDragon	*Melk* Why not integrate guilds in the rep system by allowing guilds to have fame and karma associated with it, not limiting to the existing Chaos and Order status? This way the overall actions of the members would dictate the rep of the guild
DD	Nice idea--but it's yet more messages to send back and forth constantly to update status. And we're trying to minimize that for performance's sake rightnow :)
DenDragon	*^Enigm* Many rumors about an european server: some about german or UK location for soon, others about a server with UO GOLD (so probably next year). Can you tell us something more?
DD	Basically, all I can say about that is "no comment." The PR-speak follows: "We are committed to our European fan base and continue to strive to improve their experience. We however do not wish to promise things which may not come to pass."
DD	Believe me, we are investigating. I know it is tiresome to hear that over and over, but we're workingon it
DenDragon	*BrotherCyrus* Any planned de-neutering of Wrestling within the next year?
DD	I assume you mean making it so that it isn't automatically invoked or accidentally invoked, as the case may be. It's possible that a combat revision could include changes there
DenDragon	*SpeedDragon* About Archery: Why not make a much lesser chance of successfully landing a hit when archers are firing through trees? That way they will HAVE to close the distance to have a chance...
DD	Because we don't want to make a line of sight calculation that is already point to point in a 3d volume trying to account for 2d non-volumetric bitmaps with height values for collision try to also account for the supposed shape fo that 2d bitmap on a per pixel basis. Unles syou want shooting an arrow to take 5 minutes ;)
DenDragon	*Turin* I've heard various rumours about magic weapon damages. Have the modifiers for force, power, etc. been reinstated to their older levels (+ 15, + 20, etc.)?
DD	I notified the UOSS earlier today--the values were changed, but NOT to their original values. The updated values are posted on UOSS now (http://uo.stratics.com/).
DenDragon	*BlueBelgarionQuitUO* can you confirm or deny that the murder count decay resets when you cross server lines?
DD	deny. We have not been able to duplicate any of the specific explanations that people have had for murder count not decaying. They are all plausible and nice theories, but none have panned out.
DD	At this point, we don't see any reason why murder count would not be decaying, but we know it ISN'T server boundary
DD	it also isn'tthat it doesn't decay past the original value set when the rep system was installed
DD	so right now, we are in sot of a "gather more data" mode on that one.
DD	I urge you not to murder, to avoid running into the problem if it exists. :)
DenDragon	*Rift* Has the reputation system met the expection of the dev team so far? There are certainly much less random PKs running around, but they certainly are not extinct.
DD	We never wanted them extinct, of course. Weve stated over and over that we feel PKing is important to the game's longevity.
DD	All in all, we're very pleased by the reaction to the rep system. Some issues that seemed fairly minor have ballooned, of course, such as bards and the constant killing of
DD	those with with criminal flags acquired from blade spirits and energy vortex. We're still discussing how we want to handle those issues.
DenDragon	*Vas* I had a player get mad at me for fighting a Dragon... He appeared from nowhere after I'd already cast EV, ran into the EV, and ran away. I could not cure him of the poison and 5 minutes later died. As a result, I had a murder count and karma loss. Truly innocent people feel that this is somewhat unfair--any chance that this will be looked at for a revamp?
DD	"Giving people murder count" is one of those issues that we are looking very hard at. So yes, it may get a revamp, if we can find a solution to the problem.
DenDragon	*kane* Regarding objects (such as forges, etc.) being built: What is the GM's policy on helping players create those objects until the patch?
GM_BEAST	I know that this is going to sound like the same old GM party line, but this is not something that the GMs can assist with at thsi time.
GM_BEAST	The GMs must concentrate on more serious issues related to being stuck, harassing, or an exploit situation.
GM_BEAST	WE have redefined the GM's role to a certain degree and that updated role is on our web page
DenDragon	*DaVaRiouS* Would it be possible to be able to purchase packs that you can place on tamed animals? In order to convert a llama tamed in the wild into a usefull creature?
GM_BEAST	We are also working on a GM FAQ to help players know what a GM will and will not assist with (sorry about the terrible sentence structure)
DD	It's possible, though of course only for horses and llamas. We haven't had any plans for it, but I have seen it come up a couple times in the last week
DenDragon	*Leif_Ericson* Why not make blade spirits and energy vortex like Fire Field was for a while; to where it only effects--"notoriety-wise"--the first target it comes into contact with?
DD	That is one of the solutions we are looking into, but there's drawbacks to all the solutions we've had suggested, of course. So we're still pondering. :)
DenDragon	*Falkayn* Does the upcoming weapon patch increase combat bonuses for higher dexterity?
DD	Weapon speeds are adjusted, but we haven't tried to make dex matter more just yet
DenDragon	*Dar_LoD* Any word on a guild alliance system? That is, to allow a group of guilds sharing the same war enemies etc. Is it being planned or its just a rumors?
DD	No plans just yet for an alliance system
DenDragon	*Alanon* How do I get involved with ongoing quests if I play outside of primetime play hours?
GM_BEAST	Quests will appear at any time. There are on-going plot lines that take place early in the day, and during prime time hours.
DenDragon	*Mephisto* Just when will we be seeing more quests and more storyline-oriented things happening in Britannia?
GM_BEAST	These quests are going on as we speak. The problem is that in a land the size of UO it is sometime hard to find out that these things are going on.
GM_BEAST	Keep an eye on the Town Cryer and some of the other popular UO news sites, and you will see that there are many interesting things going on in UO all the time.
DenDragon	*Khoal* About plot development, its difficult to say current if you can't speak to the town npcs about what's happening in the world. Why aren't npcs more useful than just selling and buying? Yew Npcs should know what is going on in Yew and Britain npcs should know the Britain news and so on.
DD	Well, you're asking for a very difficult thing to do in a technical sense. :( Basically, what you are saying is that each time a new story event happens, we should propagate a fresh conversation with up to date info
DD	to all NPCs determined to be within the bounding box of a particular city
GM_BEAST	We have been working to increase the functionality of various NPCs to get them more involved in the major plot.
DD	We do have NPCs that know of the plot events, but on a smaller scale
DenDragon	*Borric* What ever happened to Necromancy... have not heard anything in over a month on it... how about a teaser?
DD	I know Faust and the other Necromancy researchers will be disappointed, but we don't actually have any progress to report on that :(
DD	I do know that I have been toying with the idea of having people who do too much necromancy come back as skeletons or liches when they die, and then one more death later returning to human form
DD	but since we don't HAVE necromancy yet... that's sort of an idea without anything to attach it to :)
DenDragon	*M-OthLanar* Are there any plans to making carpentry skill-based? To where you need a higher skill in order to make more complicated items?
DD	Yep. That is part of the crafting revisions, I believe.
DenDragon	*Pushkin* Any Updates on making creatures other than Horses ridable? Llamas, Great Harts, Dragons...
DD	Not in UO proper--animations issues again. But I think you'll like UO Gold. ;)
DenDragon	*muffasar* I saw some pictures of the UO Beta, and the ships looked really cool (large and impressive looking)--could these be put back in but made to cost a huge amount?
DD	That art isn't in the game because it didn't work out :( It was too big and unwieldy, and you had no space to walk on it ,and the interior rooms never worked.
DenDragon	*Lord* Do you see any advantages in becoming to be a Grandmaster anything? Right now other than a higher succes-rate there are no advantages to trying to acheive GM status.
DD	That is not true of all skills--depending on the skill there are indeed advantages to being a grandmaster. And we intend to keep revising skills to make sure that more skills have that ladder of achievement
DenDragon	*Nanook* Any chance they will make higher skill %'s of wrestling more powerful? If you have 75% it should become martial-arts level and not take 25 minutes to kill an orc. Currently with 60% wrestling at 50 Str I can't kill an orc.
DD	It's possible. We're still strunggling with what exactly to do with wrestling
DenDragon	*Pushkin* Any plans to add in special titles Players can achieve? Such as the Promised "Dragonslayer"? (LB's Speech, end of Beta.)
DD	Well, there's that profile feature in UO Gold... ;) Sounds like the ideal spot for it, doesn't it?
DenDragon	*Moe-KGB* Have you looked at any of the new castle designs that have been submitted? If so, do you like any? And have you started considering making any changes to castles based on these designs?
DD	Yes, i have indeed looked at them. I liked a couple. We haven't started the process of picking one to change to though
DenDragon	*Drax* Lots of players have been making their own castles, keeps, and "other" buildings. Are there chances of them being implemented into UO Gold or any such thing?
DD	Not really, not unless it's one we pick out of the "Castle Redesign" webpages
DenDragon	*Starbuck* Time-frame on UO Gold?
DD	Can't answer that, sorry. :)
DenDragon	*Raunman* When will the next update occur??
DD	I don't know yet. We've just started testing on the guildstone optimizations.
DenDragon	*Roland* Magery - Right now, mages are required to use other skills such as evaluating int, taste id, spirit speak ... in order to get enough INT to use magery .. any plans/possiblity on making magery raise INT a LOT more, so that someone can be a pure mage, rather than wasting their other skills to get the necessary INT?
DD	Magery is already set to raise int quite a lot. What we are looking at is possibly adding a side skill to magery that enhances the performance of mages, and also helps int, like "Meditation" for faster mana regen or some such
DenDragon	*Players* What exactly is "UO Gold"?
DD	UO Gold is a working title for an add-on to UO. It will have new land and new features. And it will not cost you a fortune. And the UO Vault (http://www.uovault.com) has a page describing all the info that has been leaked about it thus far
DD	You should expect more info from OSI sometime, but in the meantime, we really cannot tell you much
DenDragon	*Monk* Would it be possible to turn off auto-defend, or add a toggle to the .cfg file in order to keep mages from becoming wrestlers as well
DD	We'd rather fix the "wrestling mage' problem by other means than turning off autodefend.
DenDragon	*Drakus* DD, would it be possible adding a horsemanship/horse combat skill, in which it give the more Knightly stature to the riders, also this skill would be as hard or harder than parrying/resisting spells to raise?
DD	Hmm, that's possible. Hadn't really considered it before, but it'd be a nice addition.
DenDragon	*Maelstrom* Why is the Combat Auto Move feature used?
DD	There is no combat auto move feature. There is a combat automove bug that we haven't been able to track down yet though.
DenDragon	*Auzrewrath* Any plans to re-add the Skara Brae ferry?
DD	We'd love to have a Skara Brae ferry. We just need to solve the problem of giving the ship sufficient AI to navigate. Which we haven't had time to do just yet :(
DenDragon	*S_Longshot* Any chance on giving murderers a bit more notice (perhaps visual through the radar map) before they enter a killed-on-sight zone?
DD	Funny, this is the second time that I have been asked about that today alone. :) Frankly, we have not seen a need
DD	Oh wait--I misread that
DD	sorry!
DD	Yes, we HAVE thought about giving them more warning of guard zones
DD	Shading in rader, warning light, that sort of thing
DD	what we haven't thought of is giving PLAYERS a warning when a murderer gets close :P
Toranaga	- hehe
DenDragon	*SpeedDragon* Regarding wrestling: What about making a slight chance (according to skill) of disarming a person (say their weapon falling to ground) during a fight?
DD	That's anice idea to help make wrestling viable. I'll toss it into the pot.
DenDragon	*Auzrewrath* Any plans to add the magic carpets, rain , thunderstorms (LB's speech, end of beta) ?
DD	Sure! Only problem is, we get one request for magic carpets and rain for every 350 we get for say, weapons revisions
DenDragon	*Vernagh* Would it be possible to make furniture more easily placeable? Perhaps assign arrow keys to determine the direction that the furniture will face? Furniture does not place like you want in current system.
DD	That's a good example of something even lower priority than magic carpets. :( However, I do have a programming intern laying around the office here somewhere.. hmm...
DenDragon	*KathrineDrgn* Are you ever going to consider the NPC shopping interface for PC Vendors?
DD	Not anytime soon. :(
DenDragon	*Jektal_of_BH* how about allowing successful tracking to show your target on the Radar map?
DD	I am not really fond of the over-reliance on the radar. ;( If you recall, originally it was only available as a spell.
DenDragon	*Arislan* Would you consider adding a feature which would allow guildmasters to authorize access to certain guildstone functions, thereby allowing more flexibility for guilds... especially if guildmaster takes a week or two off!
DD	Nice idea for a future addition... no plans for it at the moment. However, you should be able to switch by just having the GM declare fealty to his lieutenant and the lieutenant declare felaty to himself, thereby easily switching GMs. Then switch back after
DenDragon	*Madras* How about removing vendors from the tracking list?
DD	not very likely :(
DenDragon	*S_Kelley* As far as I know the only ways for a non-combat character to gain fame or karma is either giving or doing escort quests. Are there any plans to add to this, such as gaining small amounts of fame for, oh say, making exceptionally crafted items.
DD	It's possible, but we have to be careful about possible abuses
DenDragon	*BonesDragon* Has it been considered to have Karma-loss for casting beneficial spells on murderers now that it's been removed from casting on lower karma players?
DD	Hasn't really been talked about, but I can see that a good case can be made for it
DenDragon	*Ads49* What are you planing on doing about player run towns? Are you for or against them? Also, will GMs lock down items or make signs that show what town it is?
DD	We LOVE player made towns. We think they are the highest expression of what UO is. They rock. We love them and would like to give them better support in code.
DD	A couple of folks (among them Dlome and SkeptAck/Dundee) have been putting up web pages and discussion board about the possibility of "townstones"
DD	We're following these sites and discussions for design ideas. Any code is a ways off though.
DenDragon	*Blood* Will ship-to-ship combat be more supported in the future? (i.e., pirate-attacks, sinking or taking of ships?)
DD	I'd love to do it. When? Good question. As you can see from this chat, everyone seems to have pet projects they'd like us to take on, and there's only so many of us :(
DenDragon	*hrothgar* It is a lot harder to target with magery (single long duration click of the targeting cursor) than with combat (instant double-click with the pointer). Could the responsiveness of spell targetting b tweaked up a bit?
DD	I'll ask Stormwind to look at this
DenDragon	*Felix_The_Rat* Any chance of putting a short delay between healer attempts to res? You can get stuck if a healer trys to res you in an invalid location (Like a doorway) because every time you try to move they try to res you again.
DD	first time I have heard of that problem. I'll see if we can fix that
DenDragon	*CoconutMonkey* How about removing the built-in radar and making a good use out of cartography?
DD	Well, we put it in for everyone because newbies really needed it. :( I regret the loss of mystery and the overreliance on the radar, but we do have to worry about making the newbie experience easy and fun
DenDragon	*Drax* How about a "Merchant" skill. The basic workings of this skill would be that instead of getting just 1/2 of the price the NPC sells it for when selling an item, you would get an extra percentage in addition to that 1/2...
DD	That's a nice idea, and in fact I've seen it work nicely on other games. It's a little tricky to put into a usage-based system though. I'll have to see what we can do...
DenDragon	*Pushkin* You already have Spirit Speak- How about adding a skill that allows you to speak orcish or Wisp?
DD	Well, that would involve giving the orcs and the wisps plenty to say to make it worthwhile. :( So that's a large task. Now, if we add player races (which I am looking at ways of doing) then we could add racial languages
DD	and then we could add language skills :) But that's a ways off
DenDragon	Okay, that'll do it for tonight's conference
DenDragon	Thank you everyone for attending!
DenDragon	The log will be posted in about 20 minutes at http://uohoc.stratics.com
DD	Thanks for coming, everyone!